And of course it's not just the youths. I'm officially Losing My Dad to Phone, and TikTok is the prime offender. He spent most of the last family thing listening to garbage rw tiktoks on speaker and wouldn't put it down to come eat. Just sat there scrolling while his food got cold. Shit's awful, man

there's a powerful moment of human connection I feel when I learn about a big mountain and I find out the name translates to "big mountain"

This is right. The core of Trumpism, the attraction of Trumpism, is abuse. It's a politics for abusers, but of a particular kind: abuse bound up in status anxiety. It appeals to men who don't like that others are rising, because they know, even unconsciously, that they're not good enough to compete.

getting thrown out of the credit union, saloon-style, my loan application for “a food truck that just sells cold pizza” fluttering about me

key levers in our society are dominated by people who believe they have no social responsibility and that no one should or can demand them do anything but act in their most narrow short term self-destructive interest, and they be insulated from any and all consequences of their actions

Toward a Theory of Civic Sede Vacantism talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/towar...

All US diplomacy now involves a 40 year old round faced homunculus sitting off to the side giddily insulting Europeans like a court jester. The Europeans have to keep thanking him for all the grapes he throws in their face or the sultan gets big mad.

They have open and thoroughgoing contempt for the idea that they serve the People That's the gravamen of every single story, every scandal, every outrage. It's all the same thing

It's popular to say in the Opposition that we have to be strategic and pick our fights. I have pretty much the opposite view. Fight for what you care about, some of those fights won't get much support and will fade out, but you don't know ahead of time. And some issues will unexpectedly take off.

It's from collecting all the egg.

I think it’s telling that the guys in our culture most obsessed with masculinity don’t know the meaning of honor or self-sacrifice.

"Donald, if you're, uh, seeing this recording, you tried to abandon your post while the station's self-destruct sequence was engaged. That, you're not doing that Jack. You lost control of Terok Nor, disgracing yourself and Cardassia. Contemplate, y'know, the thing, and die like a Cardassian."

The way to understand the hysteria over "woke" is through the lens of Ignazio Silone's famous description of fascism as "a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place." Reactionary forces always begin by conjuring a looming leftist threat. threadreaderapp.com/thread/16865...

Unfortunately most of the great men who laid the foundation for our system did not anticipate us developing demon rectangles that let anyone tell anyone anything from anywhere while also slowly turning everyone mad.

The moral truth is not established by a show of hands.

It’s striking to me how completely they’ve jettisoned even superficial charm or charisma in the equation, the public face of DOGE is a guy who looks like a fish and can barely form a sentence and the comms guy is a little worm man screaming like Divine when she didn’t get the cha cha heels

One of the most infuriating parts of Trumpworld's involvement with Russia has been watching public figures and legacy media act politely baffled by every new pro-Russian position or decision, all of which are perfectly explicable if they'd just admit the truth staring them in the face.

Dawning on me that a fair amount of the masculinity crisis for Gen Z to the degree it exists is basically telling young men hardship/uncertainty shouldn’t exist, when reality those things are a giant factor in your early 20’s and you spend those years developing the skills to deal.

A thing that needs to be bluntly stated far and wide is the subtext to *all* of our politics over the last 4 years is "If we push too hard against Trump's destruction we risk white nationalist terrorism" and I think it's time to flush those birds out of the bushes

In addition to being civic degenerates these people are in every case infantile, sloppy and incompetent. Grand flourishes of performative cruelty followed by entitled pleas of "I don't know how to do this. Can you help?"

This isn't some strategic review of spending. It is an illegal shutdown of an agency and an unconstitutional impoundment of its funds.

yeah they don’t care, full cool zone ahead

Trump's attack on our democratic institutions, his general graft, has always had the flavor of the world's worst burglar trying to set up an elaborate bank heist, then discovering the guards are all asleep, the vault's unlocked, and the cameras are off.

the ethos of JD Vance is the nationalism of cucks. sacrificing every advantage this country had, every actual concrete thing we lead the world in, because it owns the people who make you feel insecure. an ideology of small men.

>looking for a new gym >ask the gym receptionist if their gym is efficiency or gender >she doesn’t understand >pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is efficiency and what is gender >she laughs and says “it’s a good gym sir” >buy a membership >it’s gender

If the President can shut down agencies created by statute and funded by appropriation, just because he wants to, then Congress might as well close up shop and go home. If the President can appoint people to do this without any confirmation and oversight, same.

If I was a foreign power wanting to cripple US power, I'd: 1. Purge intel agencies + expose agents 2. Mess w/Treasury 3. Politicize military 4. Turn off foreign aid 5. Shutter anti-corruption + election interference teams 6. Sow discord with allies Wait, I'm getting an update...

“If a hostile foreign power wanted to compromise US intelligence capabilities, would their wishlist look any different from what the Trump administration is actually doing?” <~ this question applies to most of the actions taken by the Trump/Musk administration since it took office.

a doomerang is when you're doomering so hard that you wrap back around to "well we're all totally fucked anyway so I may as well go down fighting" like some sort of mythic Norse warrior making a doomed last stand to delay a horde of jotun swarming into Midgard

The catch-22 of anti-Trumpism is that if the libs stop him, it’s proof libs were being hysterical and suck and if they don’t, it’s proof libs are worthless and suck. It is the purpose of libs to clean up the messes left by conservatives and the purpose of messes is to punish libs for sucking.

As it currently stands, we are not *functionally* a constitutional democracy. Trump is in office despite the 14th Amendment banning him from being so. And the most practically powerful figure in government right now is an entirely extraconstitutional "special government employee."

He is building the legal-bureacratic framework necessary to do extraordinary rendition of domestic political dissidents

The entire Treasury code system may have to be thrown out and rewritten. Once hackers have physical access to the systems they can make invisible changes that may never be found. The system can never be trusted again. This is a multi-billion dollar act of terrorism.

EXCLUSIVE: The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a sleepy part of the Treasury Department. It’s also where, sources say, a 25-year-old engineer tied to Elon Musk has admin privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more.

this, of course, is why guys like Elon desperately want drones to be the future of warfare. they dream of a future in which by their will alone they can kill anyone who challenges their right to ownership of all of society.

The question I keep coming back to is: will SCOTUS be content serving as a rubber stamp for an absolute monarch if it means they get everything the conservative legal project has been working toward in one stroke? I suspect there's an uncomfortably high chance they see this as a golden opportunity.

America feels like a Civ game where somebody got up to go pee and their toddler is fucking with the mouse

Average Republican: "teehee maybe we'll let you have a little maple leaf instead of a star on the flag when you join. let us know in a week when you're ready for that" Average Canadian Pol: "We will live in cold darkness and eat boiled shoe leather if it returns even one tenth the pain to you"

My theory is that if you spend your whole life speaking in platitudes, trying never to offend, and making compromises with shitty people in closed rooms, eventually you start thinking that way. You no longer have to try, and any misgivings have long since been buried in unmarked graves.

It's like if they made Rasputin Tsar